Custom Materials

[Thewoodmaster]

I have a question about custom materials.  I use chief on my desktop for design work, and then I open those files with my laptop to collaborate with clients at their homes when I meet with them.  I keep the files saved to a dropbox location so they are available from either device.  Is there a way to save custom items I add to my user catalog so they are automatically available regardless of which computer I open them with, like forcing Chief to save materials with the plan file?  I know how to do this for sketchup, but can't find a way to do it for Chief, sometimes when I open the files with my laptop it says it cant find the files associated with custom library materials.

Matt

[RobUSMC]

You can do a full plan back up and make sure you selected to include all referenced materials and it will save everything to whatever file you wish. When you open that file location you will see all the references files and textures you have to weed thru to find the actual plan file. (See attached screenshot) Once you open and save the plan to your laptop it will include all the referenced files and textures. (See attached screenshots)

 

Hope this helps

[TeaTime]

43 minutes ago, Thewoodmaster said:

like forcing Chief to save materials with the plan file? 

 

Just a little FYI to expand on what Rob said, technically the program automatically saves materials within the Plan. Or, Material Data, might be more accurate.

If you go to 3D> Materials> Plan Materials, you'll see every material that's been used in this particular plan, some will be used, some not. Literally every time you apply a material, the program takes the Library Material data and remaps it to Plan material data.

What you're encountering is very common, because while the material data is stored within the plan, the supplemental material files are not -- by that I mean the Texture file and any material map files. Those are stored on the local computer and cannot be stored within the Plan. (well, I'm sure Chief could program it to do so, you can save other Images and PDFs within the plan, bit it would result in wildly huge .plan files).

 

Backup Entire Plan is the most direct way around this, since it takes all those files and bundles them into a .zip file (or folder), as Rob showed. Though realistically you should be able to save all your custom material textures to your User Library folder (by default Documents\Chief Architect Premier X14 Data, but you don't want to sync that whole thing, you can re-map it's location in Preferences, General> Folders), and as long as Dropbox is syncing that location between your computers, it *should* in theory keep your custom libraries in sync. There's some potential hazards with that though, and every time I've talked to Support about it they recommend against it, so it's sort of an At Your Own Risk situation.